"It seems ironic that a system of
medicine rooted mostly in 'similars' should always have been attacked
and made famous for its small doses. Considering that the word
homeopathy means "similar to disease" why and how did
Hahnemann come to focus so much time and ingenuity on dose
reduction?" [1]

It is the apparent absurdity of small
doses that has always baffled people of a scientific bent. Stunned into
disbelief that small doses can have any possible therapeutic effect,
successive generations of sceptics have denounced homeopathy as a
nonsense, without actually trying it. They should appraise the system
personally; the microdose could, afterall, be a genuine scientific
phenomenon.

As previously described, the small
doses of homeopathy were arrived at piecemeal and entirely through
experiment, with which Hahnemann, like most of his contemporaries, had a
lifelong obsession. To the great frustration of his followers, he was an
incurable experimenter and never tired of introducing revisions, new
innovations and modifications to his system, virtually on an annual
basis.

"To reduce aggravations" is
the short answer to the question about dosage. His ceaseless
experimentation sprang solely from his impulse to improvement, which in
clinical terms meant making it as safe and gentle as possible.
Initially, this meant him creating the greatest distance between
homeopathy and Old Physic. The one became the shadow of the other. Thus
small doses compared to large, similars compared to contraries, provings
compared to signatures and single drugs compared with multiple
prescriptions. He could not have made homeopathy any more different from
allopathy - they are exact opposites. He adopted every principle of Old
Physic and then turned it on its head! That was not coincidence; it was
deliberate.

The similar drugs that he used, such
as Belladonna for Scarlet Fever and Mercury for Syphilis, showed
themselves to be capable of inducing the most dreadful aggravations. And
this bedevilled his progress. Having satisfied himself of the damage
caused by contraries, and thus hewing to the law of similars as a dogma
[like M Thatcherís political maxim: Ďthere is no alternativeí], he
therefore resolved to modify doses as the only available means to reduce
these aggravations. His passion for accuracy then led him to invent
scales of serial dilution and succussion, both so he knew by how much he
had diluted something, and also so he could make a standard system for
the dilution of all drugs, regardless of their toxicity in crude dose.
As stated in the previous quotations, by following this line, he ended
up firmly in the territory of microdoses. In effect, therefore, the
microdose of homeopathy should be seen as a genuine discovery, borne
entirely from ceaseless experiments with doses of similar single drugs
in clinical practice.

Hahnemann was actually advancing
medical knowledge on several fronts at once, though this is not very
well known, even within homeopathy. Not only did he investigate single
drugs, similars and small doses, but also the primary and secondary
effects of drugs, the effects of poisons, the biphasic or
toxo-therapeutic effect of any drug, the way diseases can displace or
suppress each other and the way drugs can induce temporary artificial
illnesses [provings] which can, through close mimicry, displace natural
diseases. He investigated all of these densely tangled matters
simultaneously between 1782 and 1801, during his time as a translator of
medical texts from English, Latin, and French into German, having
abandoned medical practice between 1784 and 1790. The fruits of his
labours can be read in his Organon of Medicine, especially aphorism 59
which deals with the actions of drugs.

Finally, through incorporating his
constant improvements, he repeatedly satisfied himself that his new
system worked predictably and accurately and produced only the minimum
of aggravation with the maximum of healing action. I hope for brevity
that this will suffice as an answer. Further detail can be obtained from
the sources listed below. My own articles on this subject have attempted
to unravel these very tangled matters.